“The Counterfeit Opera: A Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter City,” which opens the summer season at Little Island on Friday, wears its influences on its sleeve.
It draws not only from John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” which is often credited as birthing the modern musical in 1728, but also that show’s 1928 adaptation, “The Threepenny Opera,” by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. Indeed, many of the characters’ names — including the scoundrel Macheath and his paramours Polly and Lucy — are the same in all three works.
But “The Counterfeit Opera” is also a “fake opera,” according to Kate Tarker, who wrote the book and lyrics. The story is still rooted in underworld figures. Now, though, they are a gang of modern-day burglars who use their plundered loot from places including the Metropolitan Opera, to put on a show.
“These thieves are calling it an opera,” the show’s director, Dustin Wills, said with a laugh. “They probably don’t go to the opera very often.”
“The Counterfeit Opera” has had a fast and furious gestation; Wills said it has been like “‘Project Runway’ for directing.” It started late last fall, when Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, approached Wills and the composer-arranger Dan Schlosberg, the music director of Heartbeat Opera.
Wills and Schlosberg had teamed up on last summer’s Little Island production of “The Marriage of Figaro,” in which the opera star Anthony Roth Costanzo sang all the parts, and Winokur asked if they would be interested in taking on “The Beggar’s Opera.” But instead of a revival, they pitched a new show, and brought in Tarker. (She and they had worked on her play “Montag,” at Soho Rep, in 2022). In January, she started writing the libretto and lyrics, and the trio essentially devised a new musical in six months.
“We had a really madcap development process,” Tarker said after a recent rehearsal. “Why am I speaking in the past tense? We are still locked into a particular madness that we have foisted upon ourselves.”
The show that the thieves put on in “The Counterfeit Opera” is set in 1855, in the Manhattan neighborhood of Five Points (where the Martin Scorsese film “Gangs of New York” takes place). “It was kind of a golden age of counterfeiting in the U.S., before we had a standardized bank note,” Tarker said.
“The line between legitimacy and criminal behavior was very thin, which is a moment that we’re in again,” she added. “It really felt like we can use this to talk about today.”
Both “The Beggar’s Opera” and “Threepenny” have a satirical tone that is essential — and very much a part of the new piece as well, though the humor and slapstick evident at the rehearsal suggested a homegrown influence, the Marx Brothers film “A Night at the Opera” (1935). In general, the “Counterfeit” creators have been upping the ante with more shenanigans and more pushing of the envelope.
In “The Beggar’s Opera,” for example, Lucy tries to poison Polly. That was taken out in “Threepenny,” and now Tarker has chosen yet another route. “We’re not doing one poisoning, we’re not doing zero poisonings — we’re doing double poisoning,” she said. “And we’re going to take this scene as far as it can go.”
Tarker said that some of her lyrics were inspired by indie rock and pop. She was thinking of the Brandy and Monica hit “The Boy Is Mine,” for example, when writing the “jealousy duet” between Polly and Lucy. For his part, Schlosberg mentioned Nino Rota, Americana, Angelo Badalamenti and “Weill, specifically in the accompaniment of one of the songs.”
Weill, though, is also “kind of infused” in the score, Schlosberg said, “because I love certain aspects of that music: dryness, brutality, just kind of in your face, unadorned.”
The show’s sound has also been shaped by the cast members, most of whom come from musical theater, including Damon Daunno (“Oklahoma!”) as Macheath and Lauren Patten (“Jagged Little Pill”) as Jenny. Schlosberg was intrigued by the countertenor range of Daunno, who grew up admiring jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and would adopt a higher register when singing along with them.
“I used to call it my fake voice,” Daunno said in a phone interview. “I used to be sort of afraid to use it and think I was doing something wrong or cheap, or fake.” He started relaxing into his upper register when he created the role of Orpheus in the Off Broadway production of the musical “Hadestown” in 2016, and recently he has been studying with Katharina Rössner, an instructor at Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria.
“It’s been a real opera-centric moment in my life,” Daunno said. “It felt like the perfect sort of preparation, like training camp to do right before stepping into this show.”
Once Schlosberg discovered Daunno’s interest in testing his own boundaries, he ran with it. “He can sing all the way up to a high G sharp, A — that’s sopranos,” Schlosberg said. “In his love duet with Polly, I made a point to keep him in his baritone, then we start hearing them together and he sings above her and then goes back. So there’s a lot of sleight-of-voice that I’m interested in.
“I’m trying to always keep myself and listeners and actors on their toes,” Schlosberg added. “The first song that Polly sings transitions on a dime from rock to opera, to Björk, to oddball comedy.”
Like the thieves piecing together a show from motley pieces of scenery and fabric, the team behind “The Counterfeit Opera” is mixing and matching in a hurry, as if they, too, were in the middle of a caper.
“It’s very fitting with the nature of this piece that it is thrown together and that they’re still rewriting, and we still haven’t teched and it’s going to rain again next week, and who the hell knows?” Daunno said. “But guess what? We’re all in it together.”
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